Gaze of the Black Prince Goes Live

Wowhead posted yesterday about Gaze of the Black Prince, detailing all the bonuses it offers to players over its two-week duration. The buff is now live, ending at Monday, June 30 at 9:00 a.m. PDT, as per the previous blog, although the image tweeted says July 1, and you can benefit from higher Legendary Quest item drops and increased Black Prince rep gains until then.

Wowhead Adds Toybox Filter

For collectors and void storage lovers everywhere, the Toybox is a huge bonus coming in Warlords of Draenor. Recent Alpha builds and testing revealed an initial group of items, and now Wowhead has added a way for you to search for everything in the Toybox right now. Of course, it goes without saying that we will add more items to the filter as they become known. You can check out the filter, and also spot the new "Toy" designation in tooltips and the Quick Facts section!

Last Few Doomhammers go on Sale!

The last few Doomhammers are on sale, $75 off for today and tomorrow only, the 17th and 18th of June. The Doomhammer is usually priced at a very hefty $349.95, but with the discount it's reduced to a marginally more manageable $274.95. While this is still a lot of money for World of Warcraft memorabilia, it is a saving. You can pick up you discount Doomhammer on the Blizzard Gear Store.

Warlords of Draenor Box Sales in the EU

Blizzard's EU site has posted about Warlords of Draenor Box Sales coming to stores. Buying the box will give you your L90 Character Boost immediately, as well as a poster! We're looking forward to seeing what it is, and whether box sales will come to the US as well! There's also a note that there will be news about the Collector's Edition "soon-ish" - could we see a similar method for physical CE purchasers to get their L90 Boost before the actual release?

Celestalon Clarifies Mana Regen

Technical Game Designer Chadd "Celestalon" Nervig has posted on the official forums in an attempt to clarify Blizzard's thinking on the complete removal of mana regeneration abilities.

Celestalon

As you may have noticed, the most recent update to the patch notes included the removal of the Active Mana Regeneration, and I'd like to take a moment to explain that a bit.

First, I'd like to dispel some misconceptions about what Active Mana Regeneration was. Due to the similar name, and how it had its own section in the patch notes, some people were under the impression that it was as significant a feature as Active Mitigation was for tanks; that was not the case. It was quite minor in its impact. We found, based on internal testing, that in order to make it impactful, we'd have to make it much, *much* stronger. As it was, most forms of it were only worth using when you had mismanaged your Mana and were trying to recover. Based on its low and unintuitive usage, we decided to remove it.

Now, a fair question to ask is, “Why not just tune it stronger, so it *is* worth using?” We considered that heavily. There is probably a design where most of your Mana regeneration comes from active sources, and all healers spend a significant portion of their time and ability usage actively regenerating their Mana. However, that is a gigantic change to healer gameplay, for all healers. Many existing healers would not enjoy that style of gameplay, and we're not even sure that it'd be better gameplay for a new player anyway. Overall, we think that, while that option does seem like it could potentially function, it would not be good for the game.

So where does that leave healers for Mana management? Rest assured, healers will still have significant control over their Mana. The primary method for doing that is through spell selection. We've tuned healers such that they have a mixture of high efficiency and high throughput heals. If you maximize efficiency, you’ll actually be spending less than you regenerate (as of about blue dungeon gear), so your Mana bar will actually be going up. The way you’ll spend that Mana is through high throughput heals, which will let you burn more mana for more throughput. As your gear improves, you'll get more and more Spirit, so that your Mana refills faster while casting efficient heals. And that additional Mana will translate into more and more of your spell casts being high throughput ones, as you get better gear. The key, as it relates to Active Mana Regeneration, is that if you find yourself at 30% Mana, and the boss is still at 50% health, you do have something to do to catch up: lean more on your efficient heals, until you catch up. You'll never end up in a situation where you run OOM and are unable to cast anything. Also important to note, all healers have some way to deal minor damage with no Mana cost now, so that they have something to do when there is no healing needed, if you're the type of player that feels compelled to always be casting something.

Significant Tweets

We know it's hard to keep up with tweet traffic, especially at busy times like this, so we've put together a post sorting all the tweets since our last update into easy-to-read tabs. And of course there's the Wowhead Blue Tweet Tracker and @WowheadTweets on Twitter!

Comments

Comment by Robotusch

on 2014-06-17T12:46:55-05:00

A way for us CE-box junkies to be able to stay at home on release night, and allowing us to pick up the rest of the physical content later on, would be freaking sweet.

Not that it matters much any longer, now that the Realm First achievements are going away, but it always annoyed me that I had to miss out on a chance of adding to my WotLK Realm First! Grand Master Angler achievement. In both Cata and Mists, the Realm First Angler achievements were both done within the first hour or so.

Comment by jackello

on 2014-06-17T12:49:12-05:00

I'm glad that the removal of healer mana regen was clarified. I had a feeling that this is where they were going with it and I'm looking forward to seeing how it is balanced.

Comment by Ruiru

on 2014-06-17T12:58:45-05:00

EU gets the buff activated tomorrow.

Comment by blemx

on 2014-06-17T14:14:43-05:00

2 out of 3 alts who I am doing the quest on just started A Test of Valor this week so wont get much out of the buff except rep :(

Comment by Interest

on 2014-06-17T14:36:25-05:00

Time to rep farm like crazy!

Comment by tmelton

on 2014-06-17T15:16:02-05:00

lol blizzard you dont get it do you we hate doing BG for a pve cloak u just told us alot of us complained and didnt like it so what do u do you give pointers thats like if i hate eating carrots you show me how to eat them wtf

Comment by Uuneya

on 2014-06-17T15:23:16-05:00

There will be no baseline EMFH

Boo. Humans already have some of the best racials in the game, they don't need this too. Besides, clearing CC should never have been tied to a trinket slot in the first place.

Comment by Initial

on 2014-06-17T17:49:17-05:00

Tbh now active mana regeneration was a bad move from blizzard, there are not enough healers as it is now (or at least not on EU servers) and making healer gameplay more complicated would only make things worse. The only moment people are noticing the healers is when they don't die at the trash before Sha. Even so, ever since cata they've only made things worse for healers and it just seems they want healers to be oom if they use only high output spells. On one side this is good because to experienced players it adds more in depth to the gameplay and makes it not so boring to be a healer but with the new expected wave of players that will join on draenor release or just the players that are coming back and are used to a certain type of gameplay it will just be a huge mess. Dungeons and lfrs will be filled with oom headless chickens without even having the passive mana regen, adding it would only make things even worse. All in all I am happy it's being removed, I've been a healer for more than 5 years and I've just grown tired of how they change everything with every new expansion. Even if the spells are being altered, mid expansion items should returns things to a rather normal pace which I count as not such a big change.I only wish mana pool increase from int would be brought back into the game instead of focusing on such complicated and in the end useless additions as "active mana regeneration".

Comment by GryzorTheSexy

on 2014-06-17T22:19:55-05:00

If I understand correctly: because the new Black Arrow gives 1 guaranteed LnL proc distributed randomly among the BA ticks, and rolls for extra procs at the start of the cast (also to be distributed randomly across ticks), then we can have stacking charges of LnL, up to 5. Does this mean up to 5 Explosive Shots stored at once, or 10 since it mentions LnL charges and not ES charges? Though I'm inclined to think it's the former; 10 free Explosive Shots is just plain overkill.

I also sense a big change coming to MM. I mentioned before how their changes essentially gutted it, but nobody in their right mind would gut a spec without any good reason whatsoever, especially regarding their insistence on Hunter "flavor".

Comment by Alkony

on 2014-06-18T02:07:39-05:00

Not sure what the drop rates are supposed to be increased to, but so far I've run half of ToT LFR and gotten ZERO Titan Runestone drops. :(

Comment by Killsomethin

on 2014-06-18T15:53:16-05:00

It's the quest items that have a chance of dropping not the quest item them selfs.

Comment by robbiedehand

on 2014-06-18T16:56:42-05:00

It's the quest items that have a chance of dropping not the quest item them selfs.

What?

Comment by cephadex

on 2014-06-18T19:12:03-05:00

I think removal of active mana regen is an excellent move. As a long-time healer I have a suggestion for another excellent move, maybe healers (by which I mean only holy priest, because that's what I am, and definitely not disco) should have a random chance of suddenly being stunned. Maybe one of those nifty tornadoes could show up out of nowhere and just stun me suddenly, like right in the middle of a heal (hopefully in the middle of the new cast time there's going to be for prayer of mending, which I hope will be a twenty-second cast time cause that's challenging and one thing I definitely haven't been as holy priest in the past years is challenged!)

so yeah, how about it, bliz? throw some tornados at me! Maybe they could like spawn other miniature tornados aimed at all other holy priests in the raid. Because disco priests have been struggling so much, though, I think they should get a castable buff where they don't need mana to do anything. Also, they won't need to actively heal to do anything: just have a skill called "auto heal," and once they hit that the raid is automatically healed. This is good because it would balance out the holy priest's being stunned the whole raid. How about it?

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